Analogy offers a new interpretation of a common concern in ethics: whether decision making includes or excludes a consideration of moral issues. This is often discussed as the moral awareness of decision makers and considered a motivational concern. The possible new interpretation is that moral awareness is in part a matter of expertise. Some failures of moral awareness can then be understood as stemming from novicehood. Studies of analogical transfer are consistent with the possibility that moral awareness is in part a matter of expertise, that as a result motivation is less helpful than some prior theorizing would predict, and that many adults are not as expert in the domain of ethics as one might hope. The possibility of expert knowledge of ethical principles leads to new questions and opportunities.

COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) policies have been one of the most important and contentious decisions of our time. Beyond even the "normal" inherent difficulties in impact evaluation with observational data, COVID-19 NPI policy evaluation is complicated by additional challenges related to infectious disease dynamics and lags, lack of direct observation of key outcomes, and a multiplicity of interventions occurring on an accelerated time scale. Randomized controlled trials also suffer from what is feasible and ethical to randomize as well as the sheer scale, scope, time, and resources required for an NPI trial to be informative (or at least not misinformative). In this talk, Dr. Haber will discuss the challenges in generating useful evidence for COVID-19 NPIs, the landscape of the literature, and highlight key controversies in several high profile studies over the course of the pandemic. Chasing after unknowables poses major problems for the metascience/replicability movement, institutional research science, and decision makers. If the only choices for informing an important topic are "weak study design" vs "do nothing," when is "do nothing" the best choice?